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Article ID: CBB171217921

Darwin's Hypotheses on the Origin of Domestic Animals and the History of German Shepherd Dogs (2008)

Kutschera, Ulrich (Author)
Tina Roth (Author)

Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology
Volume: 13
Pages: 175-187

URI: http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/handle/3/Annals_of_the_history_and_philosophy_of_biology_series

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Charles Darwin devoted the first chapter of his book On the Origin of Species (1859) to the principles and products of artificial selection and concluded that this process is analogous to natural selection in the wild. With respect to the origin of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), Darwin suggested that several canid species provided ancient founder populations for this phenotypically diverse mammal. In contrast to Darwin, the geologist Charles Lyell argued in 1859, with reference to the work of the zoologist Thomas Bell, that all breeds of the domestic dog are derived from one species, the grey wolf (Canis lupus). In this article we show that Darwin’s analogy between artificial and natural selection was correct: domestication involves large, heritable phenotypic changes in an animal species over many subsequent generations and hence represents a rapid evolutionary process. We deduce the “Bell-Lyell” hypothesis and document that the grey wolf is indeed the immediate ancestor of the domestic dog. In his book on the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin (1872) described the behaviour of a half-bred German Shepherd. Based on these observations, we summarize the history of this new breed of dog that originated in 1899. We conclude that quantitative data on body mass and other parameters, documented in a series of breeding records published between 1922 and 2002, may yield insights into the dynamics of this ongoing microevolutionary process.

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